Now is the time on Sprockets when I talk about them.
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George Friedman - America's Secret War. From the Stratfor guy. Most of his analysis seemed fundamentally sound to me. Worth a read.
Philip K Dick - The Man in the High Castle
Philip K Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Philip K Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K Dick - Martian Time-Slip
Philip K Dick - Dr. Bloodmoney. Read those all in a row. Barely sane afterward, not recommended.
Eric Schlosser - Command and Control. Really fact-heavy book although it tempts one to draw the wrong conclusions about the future of nuclear power. About 200 pages too long.
George RR Martin - The Tales of Dunk and Egg. The Hobbit to Martin's Lord of the Rings.
George RR Martin - The Princess and the Queen. The Silmarillion to Martin's Lord of the Rings.
Hunter S. Thompson - The Great Shark Hunt. Long, hilarious, quite worth it.
JRR Tolkien - The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. Still haven't read his translation of Beowulf but it will be hard to top these verses.
Stephen Kinzer - The Brothers. Excellent biography of JF and Allen Dulles. Must-read.
Roger Zelazny - The Chronicles of Amber 1-5. Thanks _refugee_ and kleinbl00. Burned out on the writing style so I skipped the second story arc. Might go back.
Gerald Davis - Managed by the Markets. Dry but necessary. Really dry.
Richard Dawkins - The Ancestor's Tale. Loaded with neat information. Periodic 15-page detours into diagrams and terminology only understood by PhDs in evolutionary biology.
Michael Lewis - The Big Short. Famous. Must-read. Won't take more than three hours.
Paul Roberts - The End of Food. Thanks b_b. Excellent book.
Sam Hughes - Quantum of Ra. Online story find of the summer. Great scifi clouded by murky moralistic friendly AI stuff.
Paul Williams - Divine Invasions. Biography of PKD.
Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose. Wonderful historical fiction.
Alan Lightman - Einstein's Dreams
Honore de Balzac - Droll Stories. Repetitive but extremely droll.
Stendhal - Le Rouge et le Noir
Scott Lynch - The Lies of Locke Lamora
Scott Lynch - Red Seas Under Red Skies
Scott Lynch - The Republic of Thieves. A concession to modern fantasy. I like to keep a finger on the pulse. Beats per minute steadily declining, but anyway...
Greg Schroen - First In. Not worth the time.
Paul Lockhart - A Mathematician's Lament
George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier. Such an odd book. I read it periodically.
China Mieville - The City & the City
Bill Bryson - Notes from a Small Island
Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Edward O Wilson - The Future of Life. Extremely important.
John Updike - Gertrude and Claudius. Not as interesting as I thought it would be. Some great prose.
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So yeah that's the list, if anyone cares. Probably missed a couple. Best of the bunch were PKD's Stigmata, Le Rouge et le Noir, Brothers, The Name of the Rose, Einstein's Dreams. Only one or two really bad ones -- good summer overall.
Right now I'm in the midst of Bill Bryson's One Summer America 1927, Marquez' Autumn of the Patriarch, Reading Chekhov by Janet Malcolm, and of course Godel, Escher, Bach, god help me.
What are y'all reading? I need to replenish my list. And I can guarantee that if I say I'll read a book you recommend, I'll actually read it.